To ensure the availability of resources in a production system, it is normal to use a cluster framework (e.g. The Microsoft® Cluster Server—Microsoft is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other Countries) or other monitoring component to regularly interrogate the status of such resources. Such a monitoring component typically polls monitored resources at configured intervals in order to receive back a true/false indication as to whether a resource is available or not. The advantage of explicit monitoring is that it is possible for the monitor to detect failure of a resource. The problem with this is that the monitoring itself may interfere with the performance of the monitored resource. This is because such interrogation adds a monitoring load to a resource which may already be extremely busy. Another problem is that such monitoring can also undermine the ability to quiesce a lightly used resource. For example, periodic status polling could prevent such a resource from being paged out.
Monitoring may be acquired from a fixed set of sources (monitors) each with their own fixed (monitoring) schedule or monitoring may be adaptive. With adaptive monitoring, data values that are likely to enter critical regions in the near future can be monitored with greater frequency or the detail level of the monitoring data retrieved may be adaptively increased or decreased. For example, an increased level of data may be requested if a low-level of monitoring returns an error. Any increase or decrease of detail level is however pre-configured.
U.S. Patent Application 2002/0112040 discloses a method and system for network management with per-endpoint monitoring based on application lifecycle. As disclosed on pages 14, 15, and 16, as network management applications dynamically discover systems or devices within one or more networks, this solution allows the management system to dynamically change the polling interval based on life cycle (age, stage, phase, of the network and/or its management applications).